tironi-2013-modes of technification_ expertise

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of radical planningModes of technification: Expertise, urban controversies and the radicalness

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Modes of technification: Expertise, urban controversies and the radicalness of radical planning

Manuel TironiPontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile

AbstractThis article questions radical planning’s insistence on an ontological distinction between lay and expert knowledge. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives in Santiago, Chile, I explain how citizen organisations, in their quest for political recognition and emancipation, embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, formal and instrumental knowledge and tactics. Utilising insights from Science and Technology Studies, I call modes of technification the specific and differentiated strategies by which these collectives become technical entities. Three of these modes are described: the organisational, epistemic and generative modes. The larger claim is that radical planning, by pursuing a politics of difference, may end up enacting a world in which identities are essentialised and roles forcefully allocated.

KeywordsCitizen organisations, expertise, radical planning, Santiago de Chile

Introduction

The question of how to engage publics and communities in processes of urban change at diverse scales has haunted planning practitioners and scholars for at least a century. How, when, to what ends and through which means non-experts are to be included in planning activities is still a contested matter. If in its beginnings the planning profession was absorbed by science-based and rational schemes in which individual and collective agents were merely seen as residual and passive recipients of experts’ actions, since the 1960s more progressive perspectives began questioning many of these traditional

Corresponding author:Manuel Tironi, Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS), Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Campus San Joaquin, Santiago 7820436, Chile. Email: [email protected]

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(Western, top-down, hegemonic) principles (Sandercock, 1998). The result was the con-solidation of what is known as ‘radical planning’, a programme in which individuals and communities are accounted for as both the object and the engine of the planning process. In an age of neoliberal technocracy, these radical perspectives have problematised the knowledge hierarchies often at work in planning interventions and, therefore, the role and nature of the expert as sole epistemic reference in the search for the common good. Developmental change was not anymore a technical problem to be solved via arithmeti-cal optimisation, but a political and contentious process in which the planner was at the service of communities. For these communities were now recognised in the full richness of their identities and cosmologies. The rationalities of the beneficiaries of planning practices – the poor, marginal, native, subaltern – once the obstacle that had to be over-come by planners, are now not only celebrated but brought to the fore as the substance of democratic and egalitarian processes of political transformation (Friedmann, 1973, 1987; Grabow and Heskin, 1973; Holston, 2008; Sandercock, 1999). Here lies, at least in part, the radicalness of the proposal: the political strength of oppressed communities resides in their capacity to clash, sometimes violently, with the stabilised preconceptions and principles of Western, male and White professionals.

This article, however, questions the political radicalness of radical planning. It ques-tions the political effects resulting from celebrating lay and local knowledge as funda-mentally different from expert and formal knowledge – naturalising citizens as other to experts. Epistemologically, the political radicalness of radical planning rests in the sub-version of the arrangements by which the metis of communities is subjugated to the episteme of experts and technicians (Scott, 1998). For radical planners, the political force sustaining and informing real and long-term changes is this alter-knowledge – the local, informal, experiential knowledge mobilised by grass root and popular subjects – and not the abstract, formal and scientific knowledge mobilised by experts. But by deepening the epistemic divide between lay communities and experts, radical planning, I claim, ends up solidifying knowledge asymmetries, tacitly assuming that technical expertise resides in – and is monopolised by – a select group of certified professionals and therefore hamper-ing a truly radical reorganisation of public participation in planning contexts.

Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives that have emerged to contest urban interventions in Santiago, Chile, I document how laypeople – sometime with mini-mum financial and political resources – challenge the knowledge practices and rationalities of professional planners and government officials. But more importantly for my argument, I also show how these grass root collectives weave political strategies that in practice pre-vent any epistemic distinction between ‘us’ (non-experts–metis) and ‘them’ (experts–epis-teme). More concretely, I identify three modes of technification – organisational, epistemic and generative. These are specific and differentiated strategies by which citizen collectives become technical entities; that is, strategies in which citizen collectives retrieve their politi-cal strength not in Otherising by invoking the otherness of their position but, rather the contrary, by reproducing and utilising experts’ arguments, techniques and grammars. In these stories, the radicalness is thus not confined to the disrupting effect resulting from an Other knowledge demanding political recognition, but is more profoundly related to the political dislocations opening up when citizens rebel against a ‘partition of the sensible’ that purifies and allocates their roles as Others (Rancière, 2004). Instead of behaving as



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expected by their ‘nature’, as Rancière (2004) states, these citizens unmask the contin-gency of the expert/layperson or episteme/metis divide. In these stories then, citizens do not search for their identities to be recognised; they attempt to undo a version of identity poli-tics that ends up fixing and reducing their political affordances.

Theoretically, the article tries to enrich the conversation on radical planning and participation by introducing some insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS).1 As I will argue, some STS scholars have convincingly observed that the politi-cal complexity of sociotechnical controversies resides precisely in the fact that no puri-fied allocation of expertise may be diagrammed – and that instead expertise and non-expertise, formality and informality, science and intuition, abstraction and experi-ence, and episteme and metis are distributed among a range of emergent actors. The figure of citizen collectives as anti-technical entities as mobilised by many post- Marxists accounts is thus problematised.

In what follows, I briefly outline a theoretical framework to revisit the radical plan-ning approach to public participation and civic engagement. Radical planning is a varie-gated and evolving field of research and action. In this succinct revision, I do not expect to give a complete panorama of its complexity, but, even at the risk of simplification, to highlight what seems to be some of its underlying epistemological principles. In the third section, I turn to the empirical material to show how different citizen organisations (COs) in Santiago became themselves expert and technical agents. It will be shown that far from conforming to the conventional anti-technical figure, these organisations withstand and challenge technocratic agencies by deploying a number of technology-based tactics – which I call modes of technification. In the final section, I draw some concluding remarks regarding the challenges these hybrid epistemic situations open up for planning practice and theory.

Unpacking expertise

On difference, or where is the radicalness of radical planning

Although radical planning both as a theory and as a planning practice has mutated and expanded since its emergence in the late 1960s, some crucial epistemological principles have remained in place, at least partially. Radical planning, as conceptualised by John Friedmann (1987), can be minimally defined as the deliberate transfer of knowledge to action in the public domain with the aim of social transformation. The emphasis on action (over analytical distance) and transformation (over expert guidance) implies a number of principles that disturb conventional planning practices. First, if real and sus-tainable transformations can only be achieved by the actors themselves, then the plan-ner’s task is not to educate social collectives, nor even to advocate their objectives, but to actively engage in their processes of political action. This implies, second, that plan-ners and communities are imbricated in mutually beneficial processes of social learning in which solutions and actions emerge dialogically. This also implies, third, that radical planning emerges inevitably as a contentious challenge to state-led, formal and positivist approaches to local planning – planning, in other words, as resistance (Meth, 2010; Miraftab and Wills, 2005). Last but not least, and crucial for the purposes of the




arguments presented here, radical planning promotes a new epistemology in which the knowledge of otherwise marginalised actors is front-staged to act as the driver of politi-cal activism and change.

Indeed, a basic premise of radical planning is the recognition of difference – understood both as an epistemic and ontological alterity – as the vital force fuelling political action. This position is thoroughly developed by Leonie Sandercock (2004), one of the most prominent advocates of radical planning. For Sandercock (2004), it is through the challenge posed to conventional cultural, political and social institutions by often-oppressed identities – ‘not only of immigrants but of indigenous people, African Americans, gays and lesbians’ (p. 436) – that change emerges and expands. A key assumption is hence that there is a fundamental divide, clearly visible, between two heterogeneous although distinguishable and opposing groups: experts, profession-als and technicians, usually identified with the state and framed within White, male and scientific modes of knowing, on the one hand, and the multiple subaltern commu-nities subjected to and marginalised by the dominant elites, on the other. The critical objective of radical planning is to put forward a type of politics of recognition in which the latter group is not dissolved or assimilated – but acknowledged by the former. This means a twofold movement by which difference is both identified and made politically active: oppressed collectives should be engaged in both ‘celebrating their cultural dif-ference’ and ‘demanding that it be acknowledged and respected’ (Sandercock, 2004: 436). There is, put differently, an incommensurable fracture between two clashing worlds, and the task of radical planners is to highlight – and to some extent expand – this tension by ensuring the political recognition of the subjugated party: ‘Difference’, says Sandercock (2004), ‘is not just to be tolerated but valorized, given value by the dominant culture’ (p. 437).

Insurgent planning, a further development within the radical programme, although mobilising a less romanticised conception of civil society, retains in many aspects the assumption of an ontological difference fuelling urban politics. Indicative of this con-tinuity is Holston’s (2008) definition of insurgency as ‘an opposition to the modernist political project’, and therefore as the political possibility of ‘new and other sources’ of ‘citizenship rights, meanings, and practices’. (p. 39). Here, again, the idea of an Otherness, at odds with the modernist – legalist, rationalist, science-based – state, emerges: on one side the modern state, on the other and opposed to it insurgent citi-zens, whose political salience resides in their will and capacity to ‘parody, derail, or subvert state agendas’ (p. 47). In their insurgent practices, and in the face of neoliberal governments’ ‘participatory turn’, these citizens may deploy a mixture of political manoeuvres, including their participation in formalised and normalised arenas and debates (Miraftab, 2009). This participation, however, does not indicate an ontological flexibility. Difference is not washed away, rather the contrary. Almost as a form of sabotage, civil organisations have to participate in formal participatory spaces in order to disrupt them and to reassert the ontological divide between themselves and the neo-liberal state – since ‘to promote social transformation, insurgent planning has to dis-rupt the attempts of neoliberal governance to stabilise oppressive relationships through inclusion’ (Miraftab, 2009: 41). In other words, while insurgent planning has evolved from radical planning, adding new complexities to the simplified picture of clear-cut



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separation between experts and non-experts, the ‘right to difference’ (Holston, 2008: 52) continues to be its ontological core.

The assumption of ontologically distinctive identities is politically instantiated and applied via a further supposition: the fact, assumed by radical planners, that these clashing collectives – the subaltern and the dominant – put forward different forms of knowing and acting. And these forms are connatural, inherent and ontologically inscribed. Reflecting on the dialogical relation between the planner and the commu-nity, Sandercock (2004) explains,

Planners bring to radical practice general and specific/substantive skills: everything from skills of analysis and synthesis to grantsmanship, communication and the managing of group processes, as well as specific knowledge of labor market or environmental law or transportation modelling or housing regulation. But they also recognize the value of the contextual and experiential knowledge that those in the front of local action – the mobilized community – bring to the issue at hand. (p. 433)

The planner and the layperson can join their knowledges and skills in the search for a common objective, precisely because they mobilise different types of abilities. One con-tributes with an episteme, and the other with a metis (Scott, 1998): on the one side, the impersonal, cerebral and science-based knowledge that looks for objectivity and univer-salism; the collective, embodied and experiential know-how put forward in practical and contextual situations, on the other. Marginalised or oppressed collectives do not have to be forced to adopt technical and formalised knowing practices. Their political salience depends on their capacity to front-stage their alternative epistemology, and the planner’s role is therefore to recognise and expand this difference for political purposes. Confronted by the grammar of statistics, technical instrumentality and legal reasoning, citizen collec-tives have to mobilise alternative registers, media and tools with the capacity to represent the politics of difference in which they are engaged. In the words of Sandercock (2004), radical planners ought to

celebrate the value of experiential and other alternative ways of knowing, learning, discovering, including traditional ethnic or culturally specific modes: from talk to story telling, the blues to rap, poetry and song; and visual representations, from cartoons to murals, painting and quilts. (p. 436)

Dislocating the expert/non-expert divide with STS

The philosophical foundations of radical planning are embedded in what Barry (2001) has called the anti-technological position: the principle, traditionally held by post- Marxist thought, by which technology and technical knowledge is held as opposed to civil society. The problem, as articulated by critical thinkers, resides in an Enlightenment project that ended up subjecting substantive politics to techné, to technocracy and Cartesian positivism, therefore segregating all forms of knowledge and action not aligned with it. But STS, by investigating the situated mediation, articulation and performativity of technoscientific devices and expertise, has convincingly argued that the technical and the political, the episteme and the metis, and the scientific and the experiential are often




entangled in complex networks of knowledge circulation – and that in practice, clear-cut divisions between the two poles are rarely found. Radical planning, therefore, could be forcing an epistemic separation between two purified worlds that is not confirmed on the ground.2

The split between the technical and the experiential, the formal and the informal, has been empirically questioned by STS in at least three ways. First, STS has stressed the heterogeneous nature of controversies affecting localities and communities. In any con-troversy affecting citizens – a new urban development, the location of a dam, the closure of a local hospital – the stakes at play are always multiple, unstable and entwined, con-figuring complex assemblages of heterogeneous dimensions in which technical and non-technical elements cannot be purified and separated. Put differently, none of these controversies can be explained or solved by recourse to either technical or non-technical arguments. The moral, political, technical, cultural and economic elements are so intri-cately enmeshed that actors, whichever position they defend, are forced to take into account the multilayered affordances of controversies (Bijker, 1997; Callon, 1986; Latour, 1988, 1996; Law, 1987, 2002).

Second, STS scholars have suggested that instead of having two polarised forms of knowing, scientists and technicians often utilise experiential knowledge, while civic groups often mobilise scientific claims and practices for their political objectives – thus rendering problematic the naturalisation of the expert/non-expert distinction. Ethnographic studies within scientific laboratories (Knorr Cetina, 2005; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Lynch, 1985) revealed that scientists invest in practical, contextual, political and intuitive work to create their scientific objects. Experts are not, then, agents with a type of rational-ity of a different kind, as postulated by Merton (1973): just as ordinary people, experts, technicians and scientists rely on experiential and hands-on, practical knowledge in their everyday doings.

Likewise, laypeople often utilise technical arguments and scientific knowledge, particularly when engaging in complex sociotechnical controversies. In these situa-tions, citizen collectives, in order to gain salience, may not only attune their argumen-tative styles to those of the official institutions or actors they denounce (Taylor, 2000; Yearley, 2009). More profoundly, they often dislocate their epistemic identities: citizen collective may engage in the production and dissemination of technical devices, evi-dences and arguments in spite of not having expert training. A paradigmatic case is the role played by patient organisations in medical research, for example, in relation to HIV (Epstein, 1995) or muscular dystrophy in France (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2008). Through a number of practices – lobbying, conducting independent research, commu-nicating results – patients, instead of playing the role of objects of scientific enquiry, became active co-producers of the various treatments developed. Here, as with the radical planning approach, there is a strong emancipatory element. But unlike radical planning, in this case emancipation is not done via the celebration of the patients’ dif-ference, but on the contrary, by dissolving the naturalised identity given to them (Rancière, 2004).

Third, STS scholars have suggestively argued that the public sphere cannot be taken as a space of disembodied abstraction. Instead, the public sphere is always technically



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mediated: the space of politics has to be produced, harnessed and conveyed. Politics, in other words, is a fundamentally technical activity:

Whether in the public demonstrations of scientific experts at public inquiries, or the televisual form of the studio debate or the investigative documentary, or the ‘virtual architecture’ of discussion groups on the Internet, there is always a technology to the public sphere. (Barry, 2001: 10)

Technology is not outside politics, but is an integral element of – indeed a condition of possibility for – its performance. Public participation, for example, involves a number of democratic technologies, ‘even if these are as simple as chairs around a table and everyday conventions of conversational turn taking’ (Girard and Stark, 2007: 151). Demonstrations and protests, as well, require certain expertises and technological arrangements (Barry, 2001), from megaphones (Rodríguez-Giralt et al., 2010) to artistic interventions (Laurent, 2011).

Taken together, these three arguments suggest that the expert/non-expert divide can-not be taken for granted, and that in practice, different epistemic modalities connect, hybridise and mesh. Drawing on these insights, I will analyse 12 COs involved in urban controversies in Santiago, Chile. Based on ethnographic, interview and archive data, I reconstruct their political tactics, organisational practices and discourse. The political stories behind these cases are very much like those told in the radical planning scholar-ship. Indeed, these are stories about emancipation and the stubborn resistance of citizen groups to being passively subjugated by state bodies, local governments and private corporations. But unlike the radical planning literature, the emancipatory struggle of these groups does not rely on the exaltation of their difference and the celebration of their Otherness – but on their active attempt to dilute any pre-established ontological and epistemic divide between purified collectives. These are stories about COs who are not trying to triumph by attacking technical knowledge and expert thinking, but by becoming themselves technically literate and expert-based entities. I call modes of technification the different way by which COs attempt at enacting a technical epistemic identity. More specifically, I identify three of these modes: organisational, epistemic and generative.

The rise and changing nature of COs

A sprawled city of nearly 6 million inhabitants, Santiago has witnessed in the last two decades an aggressive process of urban modernisation with the concomitant mushroom-ing of COs born in response to various types of urban interventions. It has been estimated that at least 69 COs were actively engaged in urban controversies in 2009 (Tironi et al., 2010). Although the existence of civic and territorial associations in the city is not a new phenomenon, these COs are characterised by two novel and distinctive features. First, they have gained a renewed capacity for political mobilisation. The redesigning of Costanera Norte highway as the result of the opposition of neighbourhood in the mid-1990s is usually marked as the beginning of a new breed of COs with political capacities not previously encountered (Poduje, 2008). It has been estimated that since the early 2000s, COs have been successful in their demands in 67% of the cases (Poduje, 2008).




Second, against the common wisdom associating these political collectives with NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) groups, and thus with the interests of higher income groups, the current emergence of COs in Santiago is significantly transversal, including groups from different social classes (Tironi et al., 2010).

The success of COs should not eclipse the complex, and often discouraging, political configuration within which COs have to operate. While Planes Reguladores, municipal planning regulations, have a mandate for public participation each time they are actual-ised or reviewed, the quality, reach and political weight of these exercises is extremely limited and weak. First, citizens and civil organisations are invited to participate only when public and private projects have already been accepted for review. Second, public consultations are not legally binding; thus, local authorities are not obliged to take into account citizens’ observations and demands. And third, Planes Reguladores are provi-sioned with legal loopholes that allow the altering of community-sensitive urban regula-tions – for example, building heights – without having to go through public consultations (Tironi et al., 2010).

Thus, COs have to mobilise resources both to push forward their demands and to open new spaces for political action. Add to this the bureaucracy of Chilean local governments and the economic power of the real estate private sector, and the result is the multiplica-tion of controversies marked by different types of techno-political asymmetries. While the description of this particular governance regime and power field would require more space than this article can offer, the case of Acceso Sur can serve as a vivid example. Fuelled by grand visions of a global, modern urban capital, post-Pinochet governments have invested heavily in Santiago’s transportation infrastructure since the early 1990s, particularly in new urban highways (De Mattos, 1999; Fuentes and Sierralta, 2004; Greene and Mora, 2005). In the late 1990s, a bid was launched to construct Acceso Sur, the new southern access to Santiago. Works began in 1999. However, the project did not include an environmental assessment and the highway was projected to run literally metres away from several low-income communities in La Pintana and La Granja, among the poorest municipalities in Chile. Without spaces or resources to voice their demands, citizens spontaneously organised. Batallón Chacabuco, an all-women organisation led by Susana Vázquez, was the most active. Batallón Chacabuco, through multiple on-site interventions, media actions and, as we will see later, the mobilisation of legal–technical arguments, managed to stop the construction. The demand was a fair expropriation of all housing units affected by the project. The Ministry of Public Works (MOP) dismissed the proposal and, instead, approved in 2005 the payment by the private tender of $7,200,000 Chilean pesos (around €10,300) for the each of the housing units immediately facing the highway. The solution was rejected by several COs, particularly by Batallón Chacabuco. Their legal battle continued. Ignored by MOP engineers and architects, Batallón Chacabuco enrolled other COs and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in search of technical assistance. Finally, in 2009, after the intense efforts made by Batallón Chacabuco to demonstrate the technical and legal inconsistency of the project’s design, MOP agreed to expropriate 237 housing units, paying to each owner $15,000,000 Chilean pesos (approximately €21,500). Moreover, the project was redesigned to include mitiga-tion infrastructure and green spaces. In 2011, 12 years after the beginning of the con-struction, the highway was completed.



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The case of Acceso Sur depicts to which extent technical expertise, power inequali-ties, statecraft practices, political articulations and technological arrangements are entan-gled in the urban controversies analysed here. A key question, however, remains, a question related to how the political salience of Batallón Chacabuco should be read. How a group of women from La Pintana, without any type of technical skills or political networks, were able to triumph over the powerful MOP and redesign the layout of a major infrastructural project? In this article, I rehearse an answer. I claim that instead of expecting Batallón Chacabuco to mobilise a political strategy based on an Other – non-scientific, non-formal, non-hegemonic – knowledge, special attention has to be paid to the technical capacities mobilised by this CO. To this end, during 2010 and 2011, I con-ducted interviews and ethnographic and archival research with 17 COs actively involved in urban controversies in Santiago. The objectives were to describe their political tactics and strategies, identify their discourses on democracy, urban planning and participation, and to reconstruct their organisational structures. The stories presented here, therefore, have to be taken cautiously: while they reveal crucial elements for a better understanding of urban controversies, they are nonetheless stories about citizen collectives told by citi-zen collectives themselves. A complete vision of the political and cultural entanglements constituting the issue at hand would require taking into account other agents, in hetero-geneous positions and at different scales.

For the purposes of this article, I focus on 12 of these COs. Taken together, they rep-resent the variegated nature of citizen collectives in Santiago: involved in issues ranging from garbage recollection to heritage conservation and planning regulation, and operat-ing from both the poorest and the wealthiest municipalities in Santiago, these COs rep-resent everything but a monolithic and homogeneous phenomenon (see Table 1).

In what follows, I describe how these COs have become technical entities engaging in what I call modes of technification.

Modes of technification

‘We have several commissions’: organisational mode of technification

State technicians and radical planners share, unwittingly, a similar vision of COs: they both agree that COs do not comply with rationalistic organisational principles. Radical planners celebrate this mismatch, arguing that if a new epistemology is to be assembled, civil collectives should embrace alternative forms of organising knowledge and labour (Friedmann, 1987). Politicians and state technicians often caricature COs as passionate collectives moved by the irrational impetus of the cause rather than by technically adjusted considerations. It is not then that COs should not be constituted as rational, instrumental organisations, it is that they cannot. This is, for instance, what Pedro Sabat, mayor of an important municipality in Santiago, tried to communicate – quite successfully – when he called the members of a local CO a bunch of ‘louts’ and a ‘fanatic group’ (Baeza, 2010): COs are passionate but lack cold rationality, and hence it is impossible for them to form rational and systematic organisations.

But when examined from the ground, COs can hardly be labelled as irrational or unstructured. These organisations often operate as entities that take to the extreme the




rationality and the kind of expertise over which technicians claim to have a monopoly. This becomes evident when the internal organisation of these associations is analysed. ‘We have several commissions’, explains the leader of Salvemos Vitacura, Rodolfo Terrazas, in an interview, ‘Legal, programmatic, publicity and communications, strategy design, and finance’. The COs studied are not established as an inorganic and fragmented handful of militants, as shown by the case of Salvemos Vitacura, quite the opposite. They

Table 1. Citizen organisations (COs) studied.

Name of CO Object of controversy Urban context

Defendamos La Pintana

Environmental degradation and planning regulation

Organisation from La Pintana, one of the poorest neighbourhood in Chile

Vecinos por la defensa del barrio Yungay

Garbage recollection Organisation from Yungay, low-income and heritage neighbourhood in Santiago’s historic district

No a la destrucción de Av. Matta

Construction of transit corridor

Organisation from Av. Matta, low-income and heritage neighbourhood in Santiago’s historic district

Asociación de locatarios de La Vega

Construction of new produce market

Association of small retailers of La Vega, popular produce market

Pedro de Valdivia Norte

Construction of Costanera Norte highway

Organisation from Pedro de Valdivia Norte, upper-class neighbourhood in northeast Santiago

Ciudad Viva Construction of Costanera Norte highway

Organisation from Bellavista, middle-class and heritage neighbourhood in Santiago’s historic district

Defendamos la Ciudad

Construction of parking lot below square

Organisation from Las Condes, upper-class municipality in northeast Santiago

Red Ciudadana de Ñuñoa

Planning regulation Organisation from Ñuñoa, upper-class municipality in central Santiago

Salvemos Vitacura Planning regulation Organisation from Vitacura, upper-class municipality in northeast Santiago

Vecinos de Villa Portales

Heritage conservation Organisation from Villa Portales, a heritage housing complex located in Estación Central, a low-income municipality in Santiago’s historic district

Acceso Sur Construction of highway and planning regulation

Organisation from La Pintana, one of the poorest municipalities in Chile

Comunidad Ecológica

Environmental conservation

Organisation from Comunidad Ecológica, a sustainable residential project in Peñalolén, a mixed municipality in southeast Santiago

Source: Author.



Tironi 11

are structured in sophisticated technical divisions of labour. In fact, out of the 17 organi-sations studied, 10 are structured on the basis of at least three organisational levels: (a) a formal, openly elected governing body with a representative structure, (b) the level of leaders, either elected or designated on a territorial basis and (c) issue-based commissions.

The latter are of special interest. COs have their own experts, who specialise in differ-ent areas of the controversy (legal, urban planning, communications, finance, etc.). These experts collect evidence, hold technical meetings with government and private agents, and contact neighbourhood professionals. The CO of Villa Portales in the low-income neighbourhood of Estación Central, for example, has different expert commis-sions. In the CO around Pedro de Valdivia Norte, in the wealthier east end of Santiago, many members render professional services in lieu of paying their membership dues. The same holds true for Salvemos Vitacura, where a technical commission on urban planning has enrolled well-known architects who live in the neighbourhood. Vecinos por la Defensa del Barrio Yungay employs a similar mechanism: as one of the leaders tells us when she explains their funding strategies, ‘we rarely charge monthly dues … dues are paid in the form of work; for example, there are many professionals, and they con-tribute through their professions’. Sometimes these technical commissions or leaders resort to external advisors. The resident of Barrio Dalmacia hired lawyers specialised in heritage issues, while the Asociación de Locatarios de La Vega obtained the advice from experts in urban planning and transportation.

Obviously not all COs have similar human capital available in their territories or comparable capacities to hire them when they are locally unobtainable. But interestingly, if COs lack endogenous expertise and cannot hire external advisors, they obtain expert advice by turning to their peers.

Interorganisational collaboration is indeed extremely common among these organisa-tions. And importantly, besides knowing each other (weak ties, thin line in Figure 1), many COs help, collaborate and supply expert advice to each other (strong ties, thick line in Figure 1). That is, they have articulated a complex distributed network of cooperation and knowledge sharing. One member of No a la Destrucción de Av. Matta exemplifies the collaborative links between COs:

Most [members of No a la Destrucción de Av. Matta] live in the area, but we have the outside help of Barrio Yungay and Barrio Dalmacia and Ciudad Viva … We are working in our own territories, but we also get together with people who have similar interests and problems.

Additionally, some COs are members of the Coordinadora Metropolitana de Organizaciones Ciudadanas Territoriales, a meta-organisation that serves as a lobbying space for COs. Other COs – for example, Defendamos la Ciudad, Defendamos La Pintana and Red Ciudadana de Ñuñoa – meet on a regular basis to share information, help each other and agree on collective actions. Patricio Herman, president of Defendamos la Ciudad, has rendered legal advice to the Red Ciudadana de Ñuñoa, to the Coordinadora Vecinal La Reina and to Defendamos Las Lilas in Santiago, and to a number of COs in Viña del Mar, Valparaíso, Quilpué, Puchuncaví, Maintencillo and Coyhaique. Similarly, several COs have approached Salvemos Vitacura to solicit expert advice on the legal steps required to bring about a referendum in their respective municipalities.




COs, in brief, are not lay organisations mobilising a different type of organisational strategy. COs exhibit highly complex and strategic organisational routines. They have indeed replicated what is commonly thought as bureaucratic, rational and compartmen-talised organisational structures, based on expert knowledge and technical divisions of labour. In this sense, COs execute an organisational mode of technification: they become technical entities by assimilating technical expertise in the organisational field – and not by contesting them in the name of epistemic differences. This includes the capacity to search for outside help when technical skills are not available in the immediate environ-ment. COs, aligned with broader trends in management, are increasingly turning to net-worked organisational structures. Rather than contesting these organisational logics, COs embrace technical and organisational know-how in their quest.

‘We had to either learn fast, or be razed’: Epistemic mode of technification

COs’ success, however, cannot be explained solely by their capacity to mobilise expert organisational schemes. As it is well demonstrated in the literature on social movements (Snow et al., 1986), success also depends on their ability to magnify their causes, frames and problematisations. Leonie Sandercock (2004), indeed, argues that radical planning should celebrate, recognise and put forward new media for political action, ‘from talk to

Figure 1. Interorganisational collaboration network.Source: Author.



Tironi 13

story telling, the blues to rap, poetry and song; and visual representations, from cartoons to murals, painting and quilts’ (p. 436).

In contrast, COs in Santiago seem to prefer more mainstream tools and to debate within more traditional political arenas. In fact, crucial to COs’ political modus operandi is their intensive use of national newspapers to mobilise their demands. Since the late 1990s, La Nación and El Mercurio, two leading national newspapers, have published 234 columns and letters to the editor written by leaders of the COs under study (160 in La Nación and 74 in El Mercurio).

For the purposes of this article, a total of 26 letters to the editor written by COs and published in El Mercurio since 2003 were analysed. Insofar they are one of the easiest ways for citizen groups with few economic and political resources to access high-impact media, letters to the editor are an interesting topic for sociological research on social movements (Hoffman and Slater, 2007; Perrin and Vaisey, 2008; Richardson and Franklin, 2003).

What do COs’ letters to the editor say? With the exception of two cases, all the letters pose methodological discussions. That is, they concentrate on finding the legal loop-holes, financial mistakes or institutional gaps present in the arguments of municipalities, ministries or property developers. Put differently, the framework of the debate and the grammar of the battle, as defined by expert bodies, are accepted. The letters do not delve into an epistemological dispute about the knowledges mobilised or an ontological chal-lenge over the objects of the controversy. The debate put forward by COs focuses on technicians’ misreadings of data and their deficient application of the regulations. That is to say, COs shape the conflict as a discussion between two technical entities – rather than as a tug-of-war between opposing rationalities. This is the second mode of technifica-tion, which we will call an epistemic mode of technification: COs become technical entities by accepting the ‘rules of the game’, assimilating the epistemic logic of their opponents and arguing against the official actors’ views on a technical basis – not by Othering their argumentative position. For example, in a letter sent in January 2007, Salvemos Vitacura explains their political strategy as follows:

The referendum, therefore, became the only viable alternative for exercising citizen participation, pursuant to the rights stipulated in the Constitution and in the Organic Constitutional Law on Municipalities, which entitles citizens to amend the Communal Master Plan.

Salvemos Vitacura neither proposes to redefine the controversy in alternative terms nor to attack the inherent epistemology of the technical debate by proposing a new one; Salvemos Vitacura does not rely on an externalist criticism. Salvemos Vitacura is not challenging the government in ideological terms; the letter is not intended to unveil the positivist or technocratic rationale fuelling the municipality’s actions. What it does, rather, is to technically challenge the credibility of the knowledge mobilised by munici-pal and ministerial technicians and to criticise their mistaken reading of urban planning regulations. In other words, it shows government experts how to properly interpret the written law.




Interestingly, the epistemic alignment to the technical grammars of government offi-cials and private corporations cannot be reduced to the availability of these skills within wealthier COs neighbourhoods. A member of Vecinos por la Defensa del Barrio Yungay puts an alternative explanation forward:

We used to fight against the Chilean Construction Chamber, against ministries and the authorities, [but] it was a totally unequal battle … We did not know what a Master Plan was, or what the monuments law was; then, we had two alternatives, either to learn fast, or be razed, and we learned so fast that now we are capable of setting up a regional school where we teach other organisations.

Given the deep inequalities and poor technical preparation, COs’ only chance of sur-vival in the public arena without being ‘razed’ by the technical machineries is to master and execute technical expertise. The barriers to enter the urban planning debate are so strong and deeply rooted that, without basic technical knowledge, an organisation has no chance of participating. This is connected with the symbolic violence exerted by techni-cians, who waive their technical status to patronise lower income communities and organisations. But here, again, the response of COs is not to counter-attack such violence resorting to an epistemic and identity difference. On the contrary, COs have identified that the only way out of such violence is to share these codes, as a leader of Acceso Sur states:

The government has a very special way of fighting with [community] leaders. First, they speak their own language. On the technical part they know about codes, plans, all that. So when you prepare yourself and they hand over a plan to you and you can read it, they get … when you mention specific codes of laws, they are at a loss, and that was what triggered the respect they have for the community [Acceso Sur], because now they are speaking with leaders who are [technically] trained, just like they are.

In short, COs, in their search for emancipation and respect, apply the same rationali-ties and the same epistemic frames as their counterparts. Therefore, municipal and min-isterial technicians are not faced with an ‘other’ who mobilises alternative epistemologies and worldviews, but rather with a peer who executes similar expert competencies.

No issue, no politics: generative mode of technification

In her reflections about public involvement in sociotechnical controversies, Noortje Marres (2007) points out that the creation of publics cannot be separated from the defini-tion of issues. While publics only emerge as such when they articulate issues, the latter require to be mobilised by the former in order to emerge. This, according to Marres, is the key to understand the democratic potential of citizen participation: without an issue, there is no public, and without a public, there is no democracy.

Indeed, the success of COs depends not only on their ability to attack their ministerial or municipal counterparts but significantly on their capacities to articulate issues and to position themselves in the debate. But the ability to sparkle issues into being is not a given. It requires a certain strategic and technical proficiency: to be able to purposively



Tironi 15

target specific objects, utilising ad hoc arguments in particular arenas, in order to pub-licly problematise them. This entails political savvy, but also highly expert skills relevant to the media industry, the technical aspects of the controversy and, increasingly, the use of social networking technologies (Garrett, 2006).

One of the main objectives of COs’ letters to the editor is, in fact, to re-problematise controversial objects. This allow for the introduction of new issues that then become the palimpsest over which COs demonstrate their technical expertise and contest, on techni-cal grounds, government and corporate technocrats. Or put differently, COs became technical entities by deploying expert-driven arguments; but these arguments are not only targeted at debating a clearly identified matter of concern but also – and critically – at demonstrating the manifold technical facets that technocratic entities overlooked or denied in their calculations. COs enrich the technicality of issues under debate, opening new avenues of contestation. If experts are normally the ones revealing to laypersons how simple and naive their judgments are (Bell, 1991 [1977]), in this case COs are the ones educating experts about the technical complexities of the world. Insofar as COs become expert producers of new technical issues to be debated, I call this the third way of becoming a technical entity, the generative mode of technification.

The letters to the editor sent by COs allow us to observe what the objects of their arguments are, and what becomes clear is that the letters do not intend to defend par-ticularistic trenches but, and above all, to create what could be labelled as an atmos-phere of concern: a political environment in which technical uncertainties proliferate.

While many of these letters deal with the controversy that directly affects the CO writ-ing the letter, they frequently also deal with other controversies. Figure 2 illustrates this situation. The content of the letters and columns written by COs refers to a multiplicity of objects: problematising other entities involved in the urban planning processes such as municipalities, estate developers, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and, gen-erally, the regulatory legal framework. The case of Defendamos la Ciudad is emblem-atic: rather than advocating for their own demands, Defendamos la Ciudad regularly resort to technical and legal arguments to transform the Chilean Construction Chamber, the Municipality of Las Condes, the Regional Metropolitan Council and the National Environmental Commission into matters of concern.

By creating this atmosphere of concern in which technical critique exceeds the boundaries of particularistic demands, COs strengthen what I called the organisational mode of technification: the collaborative network articulated by COs is sustained and expanded. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, COs overflow the technical parameters set by government and corporate technocrats. Experts delimit the contro-versies, COs open up their borders; experts establish relationships and determine the institutions involved, COs problematise them. This overflowing, however, does not rest on a form of subaltern knowledge or alternative framing, but on the enhanced technical capabilities of COs. The crucial point of this generative mode of technifica-tion is that COs are formative entities: they produce and promote new technical debates over urban regulations, the real estate industry and environmental mitigations. COs are not bounded to the expert debates defined by technocrats; they also help define emerg-ing knowledge controversies.




Conclusions: from experts to processes of expertisation

In his notable book Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge, Frank Fischer (2000) proposes to re-assess the notion of the ‘expert’. For him the problem is that ‘Insofar as experts understand or treat the essence of policy to be its technical core, as do most conventional policy analysts, the citizen’s input will remain a secondary, inferior contribution to policy deliberation’ (p. 42, emphasis added). The solution, for Fischer, thus resides in the possibility to re-politicise the expert debate; this is to eliminate the positivist assumption about a value-neutral science and to rein-troduce the values brought in by citizens into the technical debate. ‘The argument’, Fischer (2000) states, ‘is not that citizens should involve themselves in the technical issues of science … The primary issue is more a matter of the experts finding ways to relate their technical practices to public discourses’ (p. 45, emphasis added).

In this article, I have suggested otherwise. The community organisations studied here do want to engage in technical issues of science and they do believe, as well, that the essence of policy is its technical core. Indeed, in this article I have attempted to show that COs, in their quest for political recognition and autonomy, do not resort to anti-technological strategies based on the assumption of an ontological and epistemic difference between experts and non-experts, technocrats and citizens, the hegemonic and the subaltern. On the contrary, they embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, technical,

Figure 2. Objects of letters to the editor (circular nodes: senders; square nodes: recipients; recipients in circle: recipient/sender match).Source: Author.



Tironi 17

formal and instrumental knowledge, tools, media, tactics and arenas as a way to succeed in their political struggles. They accomplish their goals not by being the Other to tech-nocracy, but by becoming technical entities themselves. This is done, I claim, in at least three different ways: by structuring their organisations based on functional and expert-driven principles, by attacking technical dispositions with further technical arguments and by generating new technical zones of conflict. Thus, COs in Santiago echo Fischer’s call to re-politicize the expert debate – but only if ‘re-politicization’ is not defined as the minimisation of ‘the technical’ in the technical debate, but as the technical problemati-sation of it.

How are we to understand this epistemic redistribution? The broad lesson of this story is that technical expertise cannot be understood as an inherent cognitive trait, but as an affordance brought into being along circuits of expertisation, as a fleeting, mobile and porous condition. Agents are not experts in principle: they become so through heteroge-neous means – some via college training utilising their own cognitive skills, while others self-educate themselves and tap into networked knowledge in a variety of ways includ-ing organisational, epistemic and generative modalities. Put differently, technical exper-tise is enacted through a ‘processes of qualification’ (Callon et al., 2002) which is not regulated by any of the actors involved in a controversy, but rather determined by the trajectory of the object(s) under scrutiny and the expansion of the controversy which triggers the catalysts of epistemic and political circuits defining the qualification of the expert. It was the nature of the ill-designed highway, together with the characteristics of the Chilean public sphere, which triggered a particular process of expertisation that resulted in the qualification of a group of low-income women as legal and planning experts. Expertise is not a zero-sum game; it is not located here or there, but it is distrib-uted among manifold agents and is performed in variegated forms and sites.

These findings have a number of implications for planning, and particularly for the radical planning project. In the face of ever-growing inequalities and democratic chal-lenges, the emancipatory project of radical planning is still very much needed. But, to this end, its radicalness must be revisited and expanded. Otherwise radical planning could end up enacting a Cartesian world in which identities are essentially defined and roles forcefully allocated. The celebration of multiplicity – of identities, knowledges, practices and ways of being – cannot be done at the cost of creating fixed, immutable and purified actors, doomed to reproduced ad eternum a given and connatural epistemology. Insofar as technical expertise is not an immanent feature that can be easily located in specific actors, this article suggests that radical planners should confront a much more complex political context than it is usually accustomed to. In order to be fully radical, radical planning has to include a flexible ontology in which there are not only multiple identities, but also where any one identity can be potentially re-composed, re-invented or re-articulated. It is in this openness, this article proposes, where emancipation and democracy reside.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nicolás Somma, Iván Poduje and Gloria Yáñez and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.




Funding

This article is based on fieldwork funded by the Centro de Políticas Públicas (2010), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Center for Sustainable Urban Development/FONDAP 15110020.

Notes

1. While conversations between urban studies and science and technology studies (STS), and actor–network theory and complexity theory have been already rehearsed (Aibar and Bijker, 1997; Boelens, 2010; Farías and Bender, 2009; Rydin, 2013; Smith, 2003), these have largely engaged with how to elaborate more rhizomatic accounts of the urban and more symmetric inclusions of non-humans into planning. A specific focus on public participation and pro-cesses of expertisation is still lacking.

2. Although from a different perspective, postcolonial and subaltern studies have articulated a similar critique (Chakrabarty, 2000; Guha, 1997). Appadurai (1996), for example, has con-vincingly argued that insofar as contemporary cultures and economies are entangled with and criss-crossed by global and fluctuating circuits of meaning, practices and knowledge, mod-ern dichotomies sustaining the Western world cannot be sustained anymore, and identities have to be approached as liquid and ever-changing moments within larger techno-political trajectories.

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Author biography

Manuel Tironi is assistant professor in the Instituto de Sociología at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research concerns envirotech controversies, disasters public participation and exper-tise. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Innovation and Social Process at Goldsmiths College, University of London.



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